National Plan of Action for Women - Poland

The National Plan of Action for Women, prepared in accordance with the final recommendations of the Platform of Action and the Beijing Declaration, lists as its objectives:

1. Adopting and enacting legislation to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex in the labour market.

2. To enact and enforce legislation to guarantee the rights of women and men to equal pay for equal work or work of equal value.

3. To develop and implement equal opportunity policies.

4. To improve the situation of women by introducing the principle of equal treatment of women and men in the social welfare system as well as by improving their working conditions.

5. To increase women's income-generating opportunities by providing equal access to productive resources and control of natural resources, land, credit, capital and ownership.

6. To promote and strengthen micro-enterprises and new small businesses run by women and to support women's self-employment.

7. To promote and strengthen women's new small businesses, cooperative enterprises and other employment opportunities and facilitate the transition from the informal to the formal sector, also in rural areas.

8. To pursue policies supporting business, non-governmental and local organizations, co-operatives, women's self-help and other groups to provide services for women entrepreneurs in rural and urban areas.

9. Create equal opportunities for the realization of local initiatives and for the promotion of women's and men's entrepreneurship.

10. To counteract excessive and unjustified family income differentials (through the creation of mechanisms to eradicate abject poverty and regional economic imbalances).

11. To strengthen the implementation of organizational instruments toward women's equal opportunities in the labour market.

12. To enable women and men to reconcile their family and professional roles and create conditions to protect women's work.

13. To develop flexible working hours and working schemes.

14. In policy-making, to elaborate and implement the system of indices to analyse the state and dynamics of women's poverty at national, regional and local levels for urban and rural areas.